


cleave

by faridsgwi



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon-Typical Violence, Daemon Separation, Daemon Severance/Intercision, Daemon Touching, Daemons AND Fear Entities, Gen, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Jon is separated from his daemon and it's a Thing, M/M, Mostly Canon Compliant, No His Dark Materials Knowledge Required, Pretty much every canonical character mentioned, canonical character deaths
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29861943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faridsgwi/pseuds/faridsgwi
Summary: Intercision was a highly taboo topic, so Jon didn't just go aroundtellingpeople that he and his daemon were severed. No one had believed him at eight when he said that a giant spider had cut them apart; he had applied to work at the Magnus Institute hoping to look for answers, not to make friends, not for anyone to discover that his bond with his daemon was abnormal.As it turned out, Jon didn't have much of a choice. And the answers he found would tell him more about what fear could do to daemons than he ever could have imagined.
Relationships: Georgie Barker & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Gerard Keay & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 32
Kudos: 93





	cleave

**Author's Note:**

> (I am still working on my [Auspex](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974427) series, I promise!)
> 
> CWs are in the end notes of each chapter, as well as a list of mentioned daemons and their names!

It was a very simple mistake, nothing earth-shaking, nothing dramatic at all. Stupid, really.

Jon had always been so careful, and his daemon Hedu had been so deliberately unfriendly - black fur on end, back arched, almost hissing and spitting, if she needed to be. She leaned very tight against his side at work, her small, house cat form crouched low. Anyone in her space would be in his space too, and that was enough to make sure that most other daemons stayed away, wary of humans other than their own. Jon and Hedu liked to be warned of touch before it happened, so that they could shy away, or at least brace themselves. Their habits made Jon seem anxious, waspish; it certainly didn’t help him make any friends. But it hid the truth well enough.

Then Tim had ruined everything by deciding to befriend his oddest, crankiest coworker anyway. If not for the affectionate excitement visible in his daemon’s gently wagging tail and soft eyes, Jon and Hedu might have thought they were being mocked - but Tim and his daemon Vaihedi were sincere. They were all easy-going smiles and warm jokes and charm, and both human and daemon kept a respectful distance away as they chatted, Vaihedi’s head lying between her big, blotchy Dalmatian paws as she listened to them ramble, Tim, with permission, clapping Jon’s shoulder at arms-length, always the opposite side to where Hedu perched on his shoulder as he worked. She was just a little too large to sit there comfortably, her claws digging into Jon’s dress shirt to hold on - all his shirts had holes in the same place, they were used to that. Realising that Hedu could curl into a watchful ball on Jon’s desk, or perhaps even not touch him at all, and still remain unharassed, was… unexpectedly nice. Even though they didn’t mean to, Jon and Hedu had relaxed, just a little bit.

But there was a reason that Hedu usually kept so close. If they didn’t, eventually someone would _realise_ , and Jon never knew what to do with that possibility.

Tim was the first person at the Magnus Institute to realise.

It was late enough after five p.m. that Jon and Tim were the only two researchers left in their usually crowded office: Jon was still following a handful of leads on that day’s paranormal incident report, Tim doing his own private research project (they almost all had one; Jon pointedly didn’t ask). Only the steady ticking of the clock, the faint buzz of the cheap yellow lightbulbs, and the soft sounds of pages rustling and typing filled the space. There was companionable quiet, and focus, and for once, enough space that Hedu had stretched out on the dull grey carpet and laid across the floor beside Jon’s chair, instead of pressing up against him. She had sprawled there a few times, very late or very early, when there was no one else around. Nothing had ever gone wrong before.

That day, Tim distractedly dropped his pen, and reached down to pick it up without looking, eyes still scanning his computer screen.

His fingers brushed through Hedu’s fur, stalling for a few seconds as he figured out what he was touching, and froze.

And Jon did nothing.

No reaction, no response; even Hedu only twitched gently.

Tim leapt out of his seat, jumping away as if burned, while Vaihedi scrambled to her feet with a startled bark, and only then did Jon glance down and realise what had happened.

Hedu was in his arms in an instant, curling into him, nuzzling under his chin, trying to comfort him, almost before he could even panic - it took him a moment to do the same in return. It was terrible, the feeling of his heart dropping like a stone, because he knew that once the missing pieces were in place, the puzzle’s answer was so _obvious_ . Once people - people with experience in their field especially - knew what they were looking for, Jon’s reasons for being so tense, so oddly _awkward_ with his own daemon were easy to decipher. He watched Tim’s eyes scan over them in alarm.

“What the fuck, Jon” he breathed, as Vaihedi whined, tail between her legs, discomforted. His voice was blank, he already knew the answer.

Everybody knew that it was the first sign of the supernatural, something that the researchers could half-jokingly call a _real_ case, a true statement. Missing daemons, unusual daemons, damaged daemons. It was a commonality of all folklore, a deeply-ingrained instinct: _that human isn’t treating their daemon right, something’s wrong_ . But Jon wasn’t a monster or a ghost, wasn’t made of plastic, wasn’t just imitating a human; Hedu wasn’t dead or hurt or even acting strange. If anything, she was behaving _too_ normally, shaking against Jon’s chest with what was clearly perfectly ordinary fear, both she and her human staring desperately at Tim. She wasn’t overwhelmed, filled with strange, electric energy, like any other daemon would be. His mind hadn’t sung with pure connection to Jon when he touched her. Tim had felt _something_ , just not quite what he should.

So Tim only feared horror stories for a heartbeat, and then he came straight to a very different conclusion.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Jon blurted, watching him arrive at the truth. “You can’t-”

“Didn’t mean to touch,” Hedu croaked, more to Jon than anyone; she rarely spoke, and it was audible in her dry voice. “It was an accident.”

“Tim, you can’t tell” Jon insisted again. “I don’t know what - it’s not -”

“You’re Cut,” Tim said, slowly, far too sure.

Maybe it was stupid, but his mind had stuck on the fact that they weren’t how he imagined intercision victims to be. Yeah, Jon seemed to be ignoring his own soul, but he was just odd like that, and Hedu had felt so warm and natural and _alive_ beneath Tim’s fingers.

Jon didn’t deny it. Of course Tim was horrified, he could see that - but the question was whether he was horrified _by_ or _for_ them.

“ _How_?” demanded Vaihedi, and then pushed her spotted snout into Tim’s leg, as though she could somehow protect her person from the same fate. 

Jon was silent, his fingers tangling tight in Hedu’s fur as his throat worked. He didn’t seem to know how to answer. Like anyone would, he looked down to his daemon for help, and after a moment she turned her glittering green eyes on Tim.

“We were eight,” she explained, mutedly, hoarsely. The words were cold and plain. “And there was a monster. It tore us open to eat us. Then it chose someone else, and we survived. But we survived like _this_.”

*

The topic of intercision was highly taboo, but far from unheard of. There were many ways to cut the connection between a daemon and their human: a bond stretched too far by accident or cruelty, an extended period of extreme psychological distress, or even, rarely, a very particular kind of blade, slipped between souls at just the right angle.

Officially, the cause of Jon and Hedu’s intercision was listed as _unknown_ . Not for lack of investigation, though. The police had retrieved no evidence of use on the road where the little boy and his daemon had been found, unresponsive, and no leads had turned up during the weeks they spent catatonic following the incident, brains gradually relearning how to exist _alone_ , without the constant presence of each other’s thoughts. All their hopes had been pinned on the kid being able to describe what had happened - no luck there. Jon had told all the doctors, all the therapists, all the researchers, over and over, all about the book, about how he watched his bully be dragged through a door which was not there, one of Mister Spider’s eight strong legs wrapped in a chokehold around the older boy’s mean little soul. Hedu said she had seen the daemon disappear in a puff of golden Dust as the door slammed shut, her usually laughing fox-face a rictus of terror. But no one would believe them. No matter how many times Jon insisted, his entire story had been written off as the invention of a deeply traumatised child, rambling on about evil books and magic to explain away the incomprehensible pain of being severed from his daemon.

The grown-ups all seemed so certain, so knowledgeable. Jon had never liked being told that he was wrong, but even he might eventually have believed them, if Hedu hadn’t been whispering in his ear the whole time: _you’re not hallucinating, you’re not lying, it was all true, I saw that heavy cardboard picture book, I read it too, Mister Spider was real._

As he grew, Jon would discover all the technical terms for what the adults in his life had been forced to attempt to explain to him in small words at eight years old. What they called _presettlement intercision_ \- when a child’s bond broke before their daemon chose a shape - was less common than adult intercision, he learned, but the rates of survival were much higher. Daemons who could still change were more malleable, more adaptable; the souls of young children had a remarkable ability to heal from even the most severe injury. Quite early on after the incident, a doctor had explained as much to his grandmother. Jon had still been sat in a hospital bed, clutching tight to where Hedu in shrew form had curled up limply in his lap, wishing he could feel her again; he remembered the conversation vividly, although through the same confused haze of overwhelming loss and blinkered, solely-human senses that coloured that whole period. The disinfectant smell of the ward, the fluorescent light, the feeling of his grandmother holding his hand in a tight but unpracticed grip (because all the nurses said that human contact was good for intercised patients), her hedgehog-daemon’s snuffly nose resting stiffly against Hedu’s small body, the doctor’s cautiously optimistic, professional tone as he said _their bond might even recover in full._

But it hadn’t recovered. Their connection had remained silent from the very first moment that Jon had opened that book. The space in his brain where their bond had been had become a hollow gap, a cauterised wound, which gave him a migraine if he concentrated on it too hard. For years afterwards, he only knew that Hedu was thinking about him because she would miss a step every time she reached out to his mind - she stopped wearing the forms of flying animals after falling out of the sky one too many times.

Things could have been much worse, of course. No one had really known what to hope for, realistically - but both human and daemon had survived, and that was at least a small victory. They didn’t die, they weren’t in pain; they had broken apart, but remained a part of each other. She was a complete daemon, just as he was a complete person. In the end, that was all that anyone could make of it. 

Hedu settled a little late, but not abnormally so. There had been some worry that she might not find a permanent form, but Jon had simply woken up one morning, six years after reading _A Guest For Mister Spider_ , and realised that his daemon was no longer flitting between marten and lemur and quick little lizard, and that she had been wearing the same form for days. There she was: a black cat, sat at the end of his bed, staring at him, tail swishing back and forth. She wasn’t going to change again, he realised. He didn’t feel the new sense of solidity and purpose that other people described feeling when their daemon settled. He didn’t feel anything from her at all. Perhaps just a little regret for not exploring more shapes while they had the chance.

Jon tilted his head and watched her back, curiously, apprehensively. _Is this who I am? Does everybody wonder that, or do they just know?_

He extended a hand out to touch her fur, very softly, and said,

“I love you.”

Jon said that aloud to his daemon quite a lot, actually. He said it quietly, furtively, embarrassedly, and he would never have just said it to _himself_ , if she wasn’t there - and she didn’t usually say it back. But they couldn’t give each other comfort through their minds, like other people, and the dead connection felt like yearning.

Hedu had purred and rubbed fondly against him in her new cat body, and that warmth was _almost_ the same feeling as what he remembered sensing from her before the Cut. So it was alright. They were alright, they were still together.

No one had ever been able to give them answers, though. Eventually, his grandmother had become frustrated with the daemonologists and psychologists that had been assigned to Jon and Hedu’s case, offended at how upset their questions always left him, and pulled him out of the testing so that he could recover in peace. All the investigations had been halted, the records anonymised. _Patient J., bond permanently severed, cause of intercision unknown._ By that point, Jon knew for certain that no one would ever believe them. His own belief in the incident stood firm: Hedu’s story never changed or wavered, and he trusted her more than any official reports. _We’ll just have to figure it out for ourselves_ , she had decided, resting her pointed little head on his knee.

Joining the Magnus Institute had felt like a logical step at the time - even if he couldn’t really remember how he heard of the opportunity, or when he decided to apply. It was both a sensible, entry-level position in his chosen field, and his and Hedu’s first ever proper chance to research what had happened to their bond. Jon hadn’t been able to get the special authorisations needed to look into the Dust Studies section of the Bodleian while he was at Oxford; after the few rejected permission forms, the librarians had began to cast sideways, suspicious looks at the determined young student with an odd focus on abnormal bonds and his haughty little cat-daemon, and, reluctantly, Jon had stopped trying. Mainstream daemonology couldn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know about intercision, and most of the urban legends the internet could provide were transparent nonsense: Sergei Ushanka, transplanting his dying daemon’s consciousness into a computer; Neil Lagorio, the special effects artist reportedly puppeted around by his still-living tarantula daemon for months after his death; other such obvious lies. A position at the Magnus Institute would automatically grant Jon the kind of permits he needed to access proper studies on such taboo topics - if he had the spare time for that research between following up on confused anecdotes about fractals and coffins and worms.

Jon hadn’t disclosed that he and Hedu were intercised anywhere on his application, of course. For most people, a question about bond status during a job interview would have been bizarre, irrelevant, not to mention highly personal and inappropriate. His medical records were sealed, and Hedu was decent at impersonating an ordinary daemon. Her rusty voice or the slow way that Jon responded to the emotions his daemon couldn’t help but telegraph might hint at something unusual about her, sometimes, but she never strayed too far or truly ignored him, not in the way that would reveal without question _what_ they were. Hedu got raised eyebrows or furrowed brows, sometimes, but almost never any genuine suspicion. The only person who had ever actually just guessed more or less correctly had been Georgie, and that had been a… unique situation, to say the least.

So there was no way that Director Bouchard could know. He _didn’t know_ , nobody really knew, only Jon’s grandmother, who disliked acknowledging it, and had decided a long time ago that the best way to make it right was simply to pretend that there was nothing wrong.

But something about the way that Elias’s eyes rested on them, in the way that he and his daemon glanced between themselves and then back at Jon and Hedu, made Jon think that somehow he had worked out _exactly_ what had happened. Elias’s daemon Balor was some sort of small, iridescent bird that Jon couldn’t name off the top of his head. It was rude to try and puzzle out a daemon’s species straight to their face, obviously, openly trying to work out what their chosen shape said about their personality, so he tried not to stare - although Elias clearly had no hesitations about staring at them.

Later, Jon would learn that Balor was a cowbird. At that moment, however, all he knew was that Balor kept hopping closer and closer along Elias’s desk toward Hedu. By most daemon’s standards he was probably attempting to be friendly, ingratiate himself, but he was threatening them and their secret, and it had Hedu’s fur bristling even as Jon tried to answer the interview questions politely. That was the most uncomfortable part of it, by the time they were old enough to have grown used to being Cut: that Jon couldn’t _feel_ her, but he was constantly aware of that lack of feeling, and that made him hyper-aware of his daemon at all times, scared for her.

Despite how he had scrutinised them during the interview - or maybe because of it - Elias had hired Jon. He made sure to be a fantastic researcher, even if he was otherwise an objectively terrible employee: Jon was off-putting and intense, and Hedu behaved like a kitten that had never been socialised. And then Tim had - well, it was Hedu’s own fault, really - 

Now that somebody here knew why they acted like _that_ , Jon would probably have to quit. Although, maybe if Tim and Vaihedi understandably decided to avoid them, he might possibly have enough time to photocopy some of the books he had mentally earmarked so that he could look through accounts of less-than-ethical experiments on bonds and fear and intercision, which he wouldn’t be able to access elsewhere - and - and -

Oh, Tim was shouting.

*

Jon snapped abruptly out of his spiral of thoughts.

“Jon! Jon?”

Apparently having learned his lesson, Tim wasn’t touching him, but he was sort of hovering his hands above Jon’s hunched shoulders, Vaihedi’s nose a few inches below Hedu's swishing, agitated tail.

“Sorry,” Jon murmured, Hedu clambering even further up his body to wind around his neck.

“No, I’m -” Tim blinked hard, a strangled expression on his handsome face that made him look a little like he wanted to implode. “ _I’m_ sorry, alright? It’s fine. I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“Why not?” demanded Jon, and then immediately changed his mind as Hedu batted his ear, scolding. “No, nevermind, doesn’t matter.”

“We’ve all got our secrets,” said Vaihedi quietly.

(There was a now faded and curling poster near the offices of Tim’s old publishing company, advertising a local gym, which displayed a beaming, flexing Danny Stoker, and his golden retriever daemon Urmila, play-bowing excitedly. It made Tim feel sick to his stomach every time he walked past; Vaihedi had dragged him to it once, not long after the funeral, and _howled_. The last time they had seen Urmila, she had been taxidermied.)

(But Jon didn’t know any of that yet.)

“Plus,” Tim went on awkwardly, rubbing a hand through his hair. “I mean, you two probably already have, uh, enough to deal with, about… your whole situation.”

He winced at himself even as he said it, but Jon nodded along, bewildered, weirdly charmed.

“So-?”

“ _So_ I don’t need to make it any worse.”

“…Oh,” said Jon, overlapped with Hedu, only slightly hesitantly, saying, “Okay?”

The tension in his mind and body and bristling, cat-shaped soul had nowhere to go, now: he tried to roll his shoulders, uncomfortable.

“Th-Thank you, I suppose.”

Vaihedi had begun to pace, and Tim started grabbing work to throw into his bag, clearly desperate to move.

Such a simple, obvious mistake, Jon kept thinking, and yet nothing terrible had happened. Not yet, anyway. It didn’t dissipate the fear he still felt. 

“Let me know if anyone gives you a hard time about it, yeah?” Tim told him. Jon nodded again, distractedly. He absolutely would not be doing that - informing anybody else about his broken bond, or complaining to Tim or Vaihedi about it; both possibilities felt huge and terrifying. It wasn’t something to be acknowledged, discussed.

His hands found Hedu’s fur without looking, trying to ground himself, both of them still frozen in the dull office space, listening to Tim leave. A faint glimmer of hope appeared in among the lingering anxiety.

Perhaps working at the Magnus Institute wouldn’t be that bad.

Perhaps it would be much worse. He had no idea how to tell. Somebody _knew_ , now. There was no way to undo it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- Canonical character backstories affecting daemons:  
> \- Mr Spider traumatically severs Jon's psychic bond with his daemon (referred to in-universe as 'intercision')  
> \- The Circus of the Other is mentioned to have harmed Danny Stoker's daemon  
> \- Social stigma around what could be considered fictional neurodiversity (again, intercision. This is not meant to stand in for any real life neurodiversity.)
> 
> Mentioned Daemons:  
> \- Jonathan Sims: Enheduanna ('Hedu'), a small black cat  
> \- Tim Stoker: Vaihedi, a Dalmatian dog  
> \- Danny Stoker: Urmila, a Golden Retriever dog  
> \- Elias Bouchard: Balor, a shiny cowbird


End file.
